How not to do marketing - Or, Victor by Hasselblad

Just received a flyer promoting a new magazine called Victor by Hasselblad, that will be published by Hasselblad for professional photographers. It contained so many what-not-to-do:s-in-a-marketing-campaign that it was quite amusing. The leaflet promised a free copy of the first issue of Vicotr to the first 500 people who registered on their site. Here are some of the brilliant mistakes done by the Hasselblad (?) marketing people:

- To register you have to enter a 38 character long URL. Have they never heard of automatic redirects or short and simple urls?

- To get my free copy I actually has to register for a paying subscription. What a brilliant deal! I pai for my subscription first and then the give me one free issue. Only, it actually turned out theat this paying subscription that I had to register for was actually a single issue subscription and it was free. Talk about confusing messages! How many people do you think just left the site when they say that they had to register for a paying subscription first...??


- To get my free issue I had to type in an offer code, a code that was more complex than a Microsoft license code... 36 characters long. What on earth is the point of this? Are they out of their minds? Or perhaps it's just a ploy. Perhaps just any code works? Here's my code: 9567c049-4f95-4c18-850b-749f7c5759b. (Well, actually it's not. I left out one character, just so as not to annoy the Hasselblad people too much)

- To register you have to go through a short (good) survey. One question: How much do you spend on equipment per year? And they did not have the option "decline to answer". I personally don't like telling unkown people about my finances. Do you?

- The web site seems to use a font type that does not manage to disply correctly French accented characters... (Admittedly, this may, just may be an issue with the browser, but I think not.)

Perehaps the Hasselblad people should recruite some more customer friendly marketeers.